Snitching

Criminal Informant Law, Policy, and Research

Book events/media

The Movie “Snitch”

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Next week, a new movie entitled “Snitch” opens in theaters. It’s based on a true story described in a 1999 Frontline documentary of the same name, in which a father becomes an informant to work off his son’s mandatory drug sentence. Here’s a link to the trailer.

Participant Media has created a great public information site to accompany the movie, with stats and stories about the drug war, mandatory minimums, and informants. Check it out: www.TakePart.com/SNITCH. They’ve also made a hilarious mini-video about the crazy world of the war on drugs. Watch it here: SNITCH: Lock it Down America!

MIT Professor Gary Marx reviews “Snitching”

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Gary T. Marx is professor emeritus of sociology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is author of the seminal book Undercover: Police Surveillance in America (1989) and he has written extensively on the new forms of surveillance, social control across borders, and comparative law. His book review of “Snitching,” forthcoming in Theoretical Criminology, is here. Here’s the beginning of the review:

It is rare to encounter a book that nurtures the passion for justice while also remaining respectful of standards of scholarship. Law professor Alexandra Natapoff has done that in a splendidly informative and lively book. The topic of criminal informants (which need not be the same as informants reporting on criminals) has never been has so comprehensively, disturbingly and clearly analyzed — not only should criminal justice practitioners and students be required to read it, they should be tested on it.

Among the most significant and least studied aspects of American criminal justice is how the government obtains evidence. Apart from what can be learned from direct observation, searches, forensics or accidents, authorities in a democracy are forever sentenced to making deals, rewards, threats, manipulation, covert surveillance, undercover operations and tips. Negotiation, compromise and voluntary compliance play a much larger role than in more authoritarian societies lacking our expansive notion of procedural rights. Coercion, deception and actions off the books are just beneath the veneer and support the table of our high civic ideals — ironically partly because of them.

“Secret Justice” article

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Here’s an article I wrote for Prison Legal News entitled “Secret Justice: Criminal Informants and America’s Underground Legal System.” The article is a brief overview of many of the themes I cover in the book–here’s the first paragraph:

Although it is almost invisible to the public, the use of criminal informants is everywhere in the U.S. justice system. From street corners to jails to courthouses to prisons, every year the government negotiates thousands of deals with criminal offenders in which suspects can avoid arrest or punishment in exchange for information. These deals typically take place off-the-record, subject to few rules and little oversight. While criminal informants-sometimes referred to as “snitches”-can be important investigative tools, using them has some serious costs: informants often continue to commit crimes, while the information they provide is infamously unreliable. Taken together, these facts make snitching an important and problematic aspect of the way America does justice.